Ramtin Naimi

And he took Zoom public and then ultimately sold that to PayPal for over a billion dollars.

But he's also been a phenomenal investor.

He was in the $3 million post-money valuation round of Airbnb.

He was the first dollar into Pinterest.

He was early in Uber.

He was early in PayPal.

And all roads from my network ultimately actually lead back to Kevin Hartz.

So Kevin and I met.

Him and I hit it off.

He was maybe in his first year of tenure as a partner at Founders Fund.

He started writing checks into a few managers.

He wanted to find a way to work with me, but then also just opened up his network to me.

And this is the most special thing about Silicon Valley is there are certain people in Silicon Valley who just want to help other people succeed.

I've been fortunate to be blessed by having relationships with a lot of those people.

And Kevin met me and when he ended the meeting, he basically said, if you were this good at this, not knowing anybody, I wonder how much better you'll get if you know all the right people.

Kevin had introduced me to Chris Dixon and Andreessen Horowitz and Keith Raboy.

Chris Dixon introduced me to Mark Andreessen.

I think it was Mark Andreessen who introduced me to Michael Ovitz.

Michael Ovitz introduced me to Bill Ackman and Kevin Warsh and David Sachs.

And then ultimately, a consortium came together with all those individuals and they bought an equity stake in my management company when I was 26 years old.